This news article was published under
the 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government

• IWF and CEOP will work together
• £1 million of extra funding provided by UK’s largest Internet Service Providers

046/13

Today Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced that the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) will be asked for the first time to actively seek out illegal images of child abuse on the internet, working closely with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre. At a summit of major internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, mobile operators and social media companies, an agreement was reached that the IWF should, for the first time, work with CEOP to search for and block child sexual abuse images.

The UK’s leading ISPs – Virgin Media, BSkyB, BT and TalkTalk – today committed to provide a further £1 million to help fund this new proactive approach and to help tackle the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material online. Additionally, all the companies present signed up to a ‘zero tolerance’ pledge on child sexual abuse imagery.

This will be the first time the IWF has been asked to take on a proactive approach to detect and act against criminal material. The IWF, working alongside CEOP, and the wider internet industry, will ensure the UK leads the way in the global battle against child sexual abuse. New funding will allow more to be done to actively search, block and remove more child sexual abuse images.

This is a fundamental change in the way that child sexual abuse content will be tackled. It is estimated that there are one million unique images of child abuse online yet only 40,000 reports are made to the IWF each year. The IWF will no longer have to wait for illegal material to be reported before they can take action, but will work with CEOP to take the fight to those behind child sexual abuse images.

Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Maria Miller said:

Until now, action has only been taken by the IWF when a child sexual abuse image is reported. Now, for the first time, the IWF has been asked to work alongside CEOP to search for illegal and abusive images and block them. This will mean more images of child sexual abuse will be tracked down and acted against.

The abuse of children is absolutely abhorrent – and that child is further violated every single time an image is circulated and viewed. The IWF and CEOP already do important and valuable work. This agreement will mean these organisations will no longer be limited to reacting to reports received. They will now have the remit and the resources to take the fight to the criminals perpetrating these vile acts.

It was agreed at the summit that:

A new proactive role would be taken on by the IWF, working with CEOP – industry funding will increase to reflect this new role with £1 million more provided by the four major ISPs over the next four years to tackle child sexual abuse material online;

Any relevant organisation which does not yet operate ‘splash pages’ will introduce them by the end of the month so that when someone tries to access a page blocked by the IWF, they will see a warning message (a ‘splash page’) stating that the page may contain indecent or illegal content;

All present would sign up to a ‘zero tolerance’ pledge towards child sexual abuse content on the internet;

The industry will report to the Culture Secretary within a month on how they can work to support the new proactive approach being taken on this issue through the use of their technology and expertise.

The summit also reviewed the considerable progress that has been made to protect children from harmful or inappropriate content online, including:

The four main ISPs are now offering an active choice on parental controls to all new customers;

The main public Wi-Fi providers have pledged to offer family friendly Wi-Fi in public places where children are likely to be;

The main ISPs have committed to delivering home network parental controls by the end of the year allowing restrictions to be set - simply and quickly - on all devices in the home;

Internet providers are now regularly telling customers about parental controls through emails and their bills;

ISPs will email account holders when any filter settings are changed to ensure the change is approved by an adult.

The Culture Secretary will convene a further meeting, once the industry has reported on what more it can do to support this proactive approach, to ensure that real action is taking place.

Notes to Editors

The companies attending the summit were Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, BT, BSkyB, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Vodafone, O2, EE and Three. They were joined by CEOP and the IWF.

The Internet Watch Foundation was established in 1996 by the internet industry. Sexually abusive images of children are primarily hosted abroad so the IWF facilitates the blocking access to this content by providing a list of child sexual abuse web pages. The IWF helps internet service providers and hosting companies combat abuse of their networks by a ‘notice and takedown’ service, which alerts them to this content so it can be removed.

The Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice, Damian Green, has written to the Director of Public Prosecutions today to ensure that the IWF is provided with the reassurances it needs to ensure it can carry out this proactive role.

The Zero Tolerance statement was signed by all industry organisations present. It reads:

We have a zero tolerance approach to the presence of child sexual abuse material on the internet. We will continue to work closely with Government and other parties to prevent access to this illegal content.